The NTP Story

The Globe and Mail has a long and interesting article today about NTP, the company that’s in the process of kicking RIM’s tail in court. RIM is the maker of everyone’s favorite email gadget, the Blackberry.

I guess the public relations campaign mentioned in the article worked, because until today I had the impression that NTP was merely a patent troll, trying to extract some easy money from RIM.

This article doesn’t necessarily make me change my mind about the case, but it does remind me that there are two sides to the story.

It’s always next to impossible to get the real story based on what you read or hear on the news. People tell reporters carefully crafted versions of the facts. But it sounds like there may be a little more to this lawsuit than I thought.

Taking a Page from the CD Book

It seems the TV networks are taking a page from the record label cartel book and raking in almost all of the $1.99 per episode charged to download their shows onto our iPods and computers.

I still want someone to explain to me why there is a big market for downloadable videos, other than the few tech savvy, long distance rail commuters and the guy whose TIVO hiccuped and failed to record last night’s episode of Lost. Seriously, I want to know.

Selling downloadable video is the biggest much ado about nothing since Y2K.

Even if there are teens of teens who actually want to buy these reruns of free TV shows, how much jack does Apple stand to make if Apple’s take for each sale is only 54 cents. Let’s see 10,000 downloads of Lost equals $5400. Net out your costs, and put a few grand in the bank.

Yes, iPods are driving a significant portion of the online content economy. And if you have one of those video iPods I suppose you have to find something to watch on it. But in weeks and months, after the new and the cool fades, how many people are going to regularly buy and download this stuff?

The more I read about this stuff, the less I get it.

Let’s Not Forget the Other B Word

Heather Green has a timely article today wondering if we are in the middle of a great boom or heading towards another bust. It’s a great question, and one I have wondered about too as I see Gather getting crazy money and hear rumors of Digg getting bought for $30M.

Back in the nineties, I and many others, bought stock in companies that were going to change the world and make a ton of money in the process. Study the phrase “were going to” in that sentence. We ignored it at the time, but “were going to” is very different from “were.” Back then, nobody expected these companies to make money right away- we were in the middle of a tech revolution that was going to change the way things worked and create tons of revenue for every smart idea. Here’s a list of some companies that proved to us that a smart idea does not ensure profitability, or even survival: Exodus, 360Networks, JDS Uniphase, ICGE, Enron, VerticalNet, Wind River Systems, Portal Software- you get the picture.

The combination of too much money, the greater fool theory, a media frenzy over dot.coms and good old fashioned momentum chasing led millions of people into the tech fray. And millions of people got slaughtered when the gig was up. All because the investing world got too enamored with tech and stopped caring about investing fundamentals.

Are we in danger of the same thing today?

Hopefully not on anything approaching the same scale. But if enough of these startups with good ideas and bad balance sheets catch come of the crazy money out there looking for deals, we could start moving towards the cliff. There are two ways these good idea companies can hit a homerun: get bought by a Yahoo-equivalent (e.g., del.icio.us) or do an IPO and get bought by you and me. The Yahoos can take care of themselves. If we start hearing rumblings that some of these startups are going public, then I think we need to proceed with caution.

There’s something else I wonder about. If everyone is out there trying to hit that $30M homerun, will there be any money left over for a truly useful application or product that has reasonable prospects? In other words, is there money for a company that hits singles and doubles.

Our economy was built on singles and doubles, but these days it looks like everyone is swinging for the fences.

And that makes for bad baseball and bad investing.

FeedLounge: What Am I Missing?

I’ve read some good reviews of FeedLounge, the premium (meaning you have to pay for it) RSS feed reader. So the other night I decided to give it a whirl.

I signed up, paid via Paypal (the official and convenient payment service for Web 2.0) and imported my feeds. To say I am underwhelmed would be an understatement.

First of all, the layout is nothing revolutionary. Granted, you can easily switch between 3 different views (3 pane vertical, 3 pane mixed and 2 pane), but there’s nothing particularly novel about the way content displays. You can tag RSS content, which would be great if I could think of a good reason why I would want to. Tagging is like Pink Floyd’s song Money– the first 10,000 times I heard it I thought it was cool. Now I’m sick of it, but it still gets played about every half hour.

But none of that is the real problem. The real problem is that FeedLounge seems slower than freeze dried molasses. By comparison, Bloglines seems like greased lightning. At times, FeedLounge seems to be about as responsive as Bloglines. At other times, it seems much slower. I might pay for a lot faster. The same or slower doesn’t seem all that pay-worthy.

Another problem is the updating formula. Bloglines FAQ says it checks for updated content every hour. I didn’t have my team of mathematicians with me so I couldn’t decipher the FeedLounge FAQ on this point, but it seems that FeedLounge checks for updates somewhere between every half hour (twice as good) to every 48 hours (48 times worse).

Someone please tell me what I’m missing.

What in the World is this Guy Talking About?

Dennis Howlett is howling about how Tech Memeorandum is somehow hosing him and some other guys (literally if you buy his metaphor) by not somehow linking to enough stories “impacting business.” Then he proceeds to dump all over Scoble and Dave Winer over all sorts of perceived injustices.

He posts part of an email from Gabe Rivera, the creator of Memeorandum, that explains how Memeorandum’s algorithm selects what shows up on the page, and even says that Gabe manually added the allegedly excluded site to Memeorandum’s database. Yet somehow Memeorandum is not doing its job because their posts aren’t showing up.

I love Memeorandum. I read it daily. I’m no A-Lister, but my posts show up there regularly. It’s one of the very few places in the Blogosphere where new voices have a chance to be heard.

It’s not perfect. As I have mentioned before, sometimes my posts disappear there for days at a time only (so far at least) to reappear. I wrote Gabe about it a few weeks ago, and I got a similar response to the one posted by Dennis. Sure, I’d love to be assured that all of my applicable posts will show up on the Memeorandum page immediately, but that’s not how it was designed and that’s not the way it works. What we have is still way better than watching the pigs fly by our window while we wait for that link from Om or Mike.

Gabe was brilliant in several ways by leaving the selection process to the algorithm. First, it levels the playing field a little. You still need links, which a lot of the A-Listers won’t give- or at least won’t give to me. But that’s not Gabe’s fault. Additionally, it provides for a good answer when I, Dennis and others make inquiries.

Now about that business stuff. Right now there are 17 main stories on the Memeorandum page. All but 5 of them definitely concern businesses more than the consumer and the other 5 at have at least some relevance for business. Granted, Memeorandum’s not the online edition of the Wall Street Journal (ZZZZZ…), but that’s why so many people like it.

As everyone knows, I think the Blogosphere is somewhat of a closed society. But if we want to start pointing fingers about why that is, Memeorandum is not the place to start.

In Defense of My Yahoo

Brad Feld talks today about what he believes is the coming irrelevance of My Yahoo, and presumably other portals. We talked about this the other day when I provided my initial defense of portals.

Like me, Brad has used his customized My Yahoo page for many years, primarily to track stock prices and news for the public companies he follows. He has decided that his My Yahoo page has become less useful because he no longer checks stock prices several times a day and because he feels like he’s missing newsworthy stories by relying on My Yahoo’s relatively static content.

As I said the other day, I still find My Yahoo very useful.

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I don’t check my stock prices daily either, but I really like having my entire portfolio listed on the left side of My Yahoo page- right below the overall market charts and summaries. I use the headlines, business, sports and tech stories in the middle of the page as a newspaper substitute. And I like the weather and sports scores on the right side. I think you can get more information faster from My Yahoo than you can sifting through a bunch of RSS feeds (having a separate RSS feed for every stock I follow seems highly cumbersome to me). Plus, as Fred Wilson points out, you can easily add and intermix any crucial RSS feeds with the other news feeds on your My Yahoo page.

One thing I very much agree with Brad about is the overwhelming effect of trying to list the news stories for all of your stocks on your main My Yahoo page. It is absolutely overwhelming. I tried it briefly and then decided to move all of my stock news to a separate My Yahoo page- you can have several and navigation back and forth is easy via the drop down menu at the top right of the page. So now I have a second page called “Investing” where I display the stock news stories. That page is still a little overwhelming, so candidly I don’t use it that much. But the information is there when I want it and it keeps my main My Yahoo page uncluttered and more newspaper-like.

As an aside, I use Morningstar for my stock news tracking purposes. You can customize your email alert preferences to get one email per day with links to all news stories about the stocks in your portfolio. I find this to be the perfect solution.

So while I am a big user of RSS feeds, I don’t think they serve the same purpose as My Yahoo or any similar portal. RSS feeds aren’t a good substitute for the morning paper, whereas My Yahoo is. That’s why I’m still a big fan of My Yahoo.

Only Their Hairdressers Know for Sure

First Yahoo was going to buy Digg. Now it’s not. Yahoo gave up on search. Wait, no they didn’t.

I feel like I’m at the playground with my kids and all of their friends when someone runs up to me every three minutes and shares a breaking story about who used potty talk and who isn’t sharing his or her toys.

When I speak of bloggers talking at and not to each other, this is what I’m talking about. Someone throws a topic out there and like a nineties dot.com stock everybody buys it immediately. Few people stop to wonder if it’s a good buy or not. Most just start reporting the news and/or telling us what they think about it.

And while I’m on the topic of nineties dot.com stocks, if Yahoo does pay $30M for Digg, I am going to sell all of my tech stocks because another dot.com bust is headed our way.

Cool is good. Digg is cool. Traffic is good. Digg has a lot of traffic. To warrant a $30M price tag, however, lots and lots of revenue needs to be in the pipeline, not on the drawing board. Digg has revenue, but I’d be very surprised if anything close to a $30M price tag isn’t some combination of betting on the come (which lost us all a ton of money back in the nineties) and the greater fool theory (which is the basis of far too much of our markets at this point).

When I see these sites, even great ones like Digg, get mentioned in the same breath as $30M, I wonder what, if anything, we learned from the last dot.com boom and the portfolio killing bust that naturally followed.

Google Video and the Swaggartization of Tech Titans

Google is now admitting that it screwed up the much ballyhooed launch of Google Video by not adequately promoting all the great free TV shows that could be bought, downloaded and watched in a tiny box on your iPod or computer. Somehow things would have been different if all those free shows for sale had been pasted all over the Google Video homepage.

Well, friends, now there are links to Brady Bunch and I Love Lucy episodes right there on the homepage. Buy as many as you want for $1.99 a piece. Or you can tune into TV Land any night of the week and watch them on your TV for free.

There’s also a link to the CSI-Name any City show that anyone who cares has already seen. You can buy it and watch it for a whole day for $1.99. That’s right, a whole day.

But it’s just cooler to watch them on your computer. Right.

Steve Rubel points out that this is the week for tech titans to fall all over themselves admitting their mistakes and promising to do better. He also says that smart people knew all along that Google was blowing it. He cites an article from January 10 questioning the announcement and content of Google video. Steve must have missed my post of January 6 where I asked if anyone was going to line up to pay to watch repeats of boring NBA games and otherwise free TV shows on their computers.

I don’t think the homepage has all that much to do with it. I just don’t think anyone wants to buy much of what they’re selling. For this to get legs, there will have to be a lot of stuff there ain’t right now. Fat, cheap pipe; better hardware on the receiving end to manage; and enough content providers to let you cut the cable. Among other things.

I can see a modest market for downloadable, DRM-infested video courtesy of frequent travelers who need something to watch while on planes and in airports. I use Movielink for just that purpose. So while people might want to download something to watch on the plane or train, how many people will do that regularly? My guess: very few.

For one thing, it’s a little hard to watch a video on a laptop or iPod, even on a long flight. I know, because I sometimes watch movies on my Tablet PC on long flights. But more often than not, I end up turning off the movie and reading a book or sleeping. Plus, people don’t like to pay twice and all of us already have access to these shows via our TVs and TIVOs. Finally, how many long distance commuters (a) prefer watching I Love Lucy to sleeping, talking or staring out the window and (b) have the means and methods to find, download and play I Love Lucy on their iPods or laptops?

I’ll say it again: Other than the occasional lottery scam video, I just don’t get the whole downloadable video thing. Maybe one day, but not today.

I think someone’s trying to create a market for a demand that doesn’t exist.

Can the Web Be a Community?

Blogspotting asks today if the lack of a community mindset might make it hard for the citizen media movement to take hold in the sprawling metropolitan areas many of us live in.

The question originated from Amy Gahran’s conversation about whether the lack of a broad community mindset with respect to the Bay Area might have contributed to Bayosphere’s demise.

Amy makes some good points. One of them, via a conversation she had with a friend from the Bay Area:

My colleague, who lives in the Bay Area, observed that in that region there’s virtually no awareness of the Bay Area as a community. People there, he said, tend to be more aware of and engaged with their towns or neighborhoods, not the “Bay Area.”

I expect that sort of thing is true for a lot of people. I live in Houston, but not really. Although I live barely 8 miles from downtown, I live in a town called Bellaire. My kids go to school there. They play sports there. The places we eat and the places we shop are there. Most of our friends live there.

I care about Houston, but I care a lot about Bellaire.

But I think the internet and the citizen media that’s a part thereof should be looked at from a different angle.

When I read and talk about tech, music or current events, it is the opportunity to converse with people from all over the world that drives me to the internet. I think the internet in general and the blogosphere in particular have to develop community awareness around topics, as opposed to geography.

I read Dwight Silverman‘s blog every day. Not because he lives in Houston, but because he writes well on topics that interest me. Similarly, I read Ed Bott every day for the same reason, and I don’t even know where he lives. Many of the folks I converse with on a regular basis are from Canada or the UK.

So for me the question becomes can we build cross-blog communities (not to be confused with clubs where you have to be invited to join) based on shared interests? I hope so, but candidly I’m not sure.

I talked about message boards the other day and explained why I think they are still relevant. The main reason is because there is more immediate give and take on active message boards. There are actual conversations you can follow as they meander around the topic.

It’s harder to do that with blogs. A lot of times it seems like bloggers are just talking over or at each other. To converse you have to listen. I don’t know how we do it, but we have to figure out how to stop talking at each other and start talking to (and listening to) each other.

Otherwise we’re just noise.

ScobleFeeds A-Z: The O’s

This is part fourteen of my A-Z review of Scoble‘s feeds. The rules and criteria are here.

There aren’t many O’s, but I found a good one:

Overdo’s Land of Nothingness (RSS Feed)

Overdo’s Land of Nothingness is a tech/general interest blog, with a lot of Microsoft tech tips, beta coverage and stories.

Honorable Mention:

Om Malik on Broadband (RSS Feed) (ineligible because I like every other living human read it)